The “disease of kings” has now reached the masses. In the past half century the prevalence of gout in the general U.S. population has more than doubled. Once thought of only for the privileged few who had the means to overindulge in food and drink, gout now afflicts more than eight million American adults. And research suggests that the rates of this form of localized arthritis are still on the rise. [More]

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Gout on the Rise as Americans Gain Weight

The “disease of kings” has now reached the masses. In the past half century the prevalence of gout in the general U.S. population has more than doubled. Once thought of only for the privileged few who had the means to overindulge in food and drink, gout now afflicts more than eight million American adults. And research suggests that the rates of this form of localized arthritis are still on the rise. [More]

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Gout on the Rise as Americans Gain Weight

Inhaling cigarette smoke or smoggy air is clearly not great for your health. And exposure to various kinds of smoke has been associated with cardiovascular disease, rheumatoid arthritis and cataracts . [More]

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Disease-Causing Compound Found in Air Clogged with Smoke from Cigarettes, Fires or Air Pollution

When I first met Tina, a woman in her late 20s, she had been seeing mental health professionals for virtually her entire life. “One day I’m energetic and creative,” she told me during one of our therapy sessions, “the next I am aimless, or I cry and feel worthless.” Tina had been diagnosed with depression, borderline personality disorder and even schizophrenia. Doctors prescribed antidepressants and later antipsychotics–but the meds only seemed to make her worse. At first I, too, saw her difficulties through the lens of a psychologist, thinking she had bipolar disorder. But later I noticed that her mood swings were accompanied by symptoms such as a racing heart, nausea and joint pain. So I asked her doctors to do a thorough blood workup. Finally, after her 30th birthday, a doctor discovered the real cause of her suffering: porphyria, a group of rare genetic metabolic disorders. In people with porphyria, precursors of hemoglobin (the molecule that carries oxygen in red blood cells) called porphyrins accumulate in various body systems, causing symptoms from abdominal pain to depression. The female sex hormone progesterone tends to aggravate the condition, so Tina’s moods followed her menstrual cycle. Because the disorder affects the liver, the body has difficulty processing medication, so drugs often create perplexing new symptoms. [More]

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Ruled by the Body: How Physical Illness Affects the Brain (preview)

In 2007 parasite immunologist P’ng Loke sat down for lunch at a University of California, San Francisco, cafeteria with a patient who wanted help documenting his medical condition. The two shared an unusual interest: gut worms–specifically, tiny wormlike parasitic organisms called helminths. Loke’s 35-year-old guest, who declined to be identified for reasons of patient confidentiality, explained that he suffered from an inflammatory bowel disease known as ulcerative colitis. While researching his condition a few years before, the man had read about helminthic therapy, which has not been approved by the FDA but which is a subject of active research by gastroenterologists and parasitologists. The idea is that people with autoimmune disorders can ease their symptoms by deliberately infecting themselves with parasitic worms such as hookworm or whipworm, both of which supposedly pacify the human immune system to survive inside the body. In numerous animal studies, these parasites ostensibly protected rodents from a wide variety of immunological disorders, including colitis, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, food allergies and type 1 diabetes. The man had convinced himself the therapy could work for him, and, since 2004, he had been ingesting whipworm eggs, which he obtained from Thailand. He was now virtually symptom-free. Could Loke help him figure out how, if at all, the worms had treated his colitis? [More]

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They Like Your Guts

Like people, mice sometimes show signs of general confusion and memory loss after surgery. Common major ( noncardiac ) procedures, such as orthopedic operations, can lead to postsurgical cognitive decline in some seven to 26 percent of patients. And though it’s usually temporary, this mental fogginess has been linked to worse overall recovery and long-term cognitive problems . [More]

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Could a dose of arthritis medication prevent postsurgical memory loss?

With a scan through a sample of genomes from several individuals, researchers can tease out links among genetic variations and particular diseases . These genome-wide association studies have clarified some of the genes involved in predisposing people for

With a scan through a sample of genomes from several individuals, researchers can tease out links among genetic variations and particular diseases . These genome-wide association studies have clarified some of the genes involved in predisposing people for

A pregnant woman knows she is shaping her child’s future from the moment of conception. But she might not realize that the baby is already talking back. Mother and child are engaged in a silent chemical conversation throughout pregnancy, with bits of genetic material and cells passing not only from mother to child but also from child to mother

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Beyond Birth: A Child’s Cells May Help or Harm the Mother Long after Delivery

The human body’s immune system can quickly track down and kill cells that don’t belong. Take certain kinds of bacteria: molecules on their surfaces flag them as foreign invaders, alerting the body’s defenders to the breach and drawing a full-fledged attack on anything waving that molecular flag. But sometimes the system mistakenly attacks the body’s own cells

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Counterintuitive Cure: A Nanovaccine That Stops Autoimmune Disease by Boosting the Immune System